Police Quest IV: Open Season – A Fair & Balanced Retrospective

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Features by Adventure Game Hotspot staff
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As much as he'd have liked to put it off forever, the time has finally come for the Space Quest Historian to finish off his "Fair & Balanced" retrospectives of Sierra's Police Quest series with a look back at the steaming pile that was Open Season.

The fourth and blissfully final Police Quest adventure game (not counting the tactical action spin-off SWAT) has just about zero in common with its predecessors, which is roughly equal to the amount of fun players are likely to have with it. There's no Jim Walls behind it, no hand-painted pixel art, no Sonny Bonds as star, no city of Lytton, very little police procedural gameplay, and virtually no entertainment value, except for the unintentionally amusing kind.

In its place is a game boldly credited on the box to Daryl Gates, the former police chief of the LAPD. Which is weird, because Gates didn't design the game, yet someone thought it was a good idea to make him its poster boy just two years after his infamous role in the Rodney King riots.

So there's that. But inside the box, the game is worthy of derision all on its own, from its "mushy, pixelated" graphics made from digitized low-res photographs of Los Angeles; to its "wet fart of a non-person" protagonist, Detective Carey; to the "absolute slog" of a pace and often highly nonsensical investigative gameplay that would have had even Spaceballs' Dark Helmet bewildered. Throw in some hideously distasteful red herrings, dead animals, and an ending filled with "gobsmacking madness" and you're bound to end up with a "depressingly goofy trainwreck."

Of course, the worse the game is, the funnier SQH's tirades are, even when he's trying to be fair & balanced, so have a gander at the video below, and be sure to stick around for the post-credits blooper reel!

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